1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a method and apparatus for determining and repeatedly playing back a specific video section on the basis of subtitles being displayed synchronously with a video data stream.
2. Description of the Related Art
Optical discs that are capable of storing large amounts of high-quality video and audio data, have been available on the market. The digital versatile disc (DVD) and DVD rewritable (DVD-RW) are examples of the optical discs. The high-quality moving pictures have been usually provided for users as DVD titles. Recently, based on DivX codec, which is a video codec proposed for better compression, DivX-formatted movies (hereinafter referred to as DivX movies) have been widely provided as downloadable files on-line.
DivX movies usually offer a single language subtitle, not multi-language subtitles. Therefore, users who want to watch a DivX movie with a foreign language subtitle need an additional file that provides a different subtitle comprehensible to the users as well as timing information for synchronization of this subtitle with video streams. This file is commonly referred to as synchronized accessible media interchange (SMI) file.
The SMI file is user-editable. The SMI file includes subtitle data and synchronization timing information required to display the subtitle synchronously with the video stream. As shown in FIG. 1, the subtitle such as “How's going these days?” is displayed in synchronization with the associated video stream at its synchronization start time, which is usually represented by the elapsed time since the start playback time of the DivX movie.
While watching a DivX movie, users who practice listening to foreign languages often want to repeatedly view and listen to particular subtitles and the related audio signals. However, the method to accomplish this is not yet available and is needed.